Kandinsky

Throughout his career, the painter, printmaker, teacher and theoretician Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) He revolutionized not only his own style, but the very course of art history. After abandoning the figurative and landscape painting of his early days, he was the first to experiment with a spiritual, rhythmic and emotional use of line and color thanks to which today he is recognized as the father of the first totally abstract work .

Kandinsky's interests in music, theater, poetry, philosophy, ethnology, myth, and the occult—as a teacher and theoretician as well as an active artist—were all essential components of his painting and printmaking. The legacy of Kandinsky, who was a member of the influential groups of the Blue Reiter and of the Bauhaus , is not limited to an extraordinary visual corpus, but also includes a series of extremely influential essays such as The spiritual in art . Among the cardinal principles exposed were the connections between painting and music and mystical experience as well as the purification of art from materialistic realism in favor of an expression full of emotion, condensed in particular by the color .

This volume presents some of Kandinsky's most important works to offer an overview of his repertoire of forms, emotions, and vibrant colors. Tracing the artist's radical stylistic development, the volume shows how the evolution of a single painter paved the way for future generations of Abstract Expressionists.